This Week in Google Alerts: R.A. Lafferty

Antonin Scriabin · 17 Apr 2012, 18:21 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: kierkegaurdian at gmail.com (Antonin Scriabin)
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:21:07 -0400
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: R.A. Lafferty
In-Reply-To: <CAJ8=rtixc9Ns+XDFTeYVer1G+N2cZ284csEK7saZM=_zunPS=w at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAGB0RZ7UiWMRspR8c-XiOTTY5xuS6D--F1Td_-CAQ1CxrtqtPA at mail.gmail.com>
	<1334675594.95733.YahooMailClassic at web161804.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
	<CAGB0RZ5yLD9BYEEZfLbhhn9FNw2Q_6Am3N02eRV3NV2eP+0EWQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<1334682388.6567.YahooMailNeo at web114705.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<CAGB0RZ5W8oUbc6X1M9qSXbbD-ZXkwg2oCrpdB8ZGaWxAO1TBnQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<4F8DB1CB.1060909 at irit.fr>
	<CAJ8=rtixc9Ns+XDFTeYVer1G+N2cZ284csEK7saZM=_zunPS=w at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAM0v-i4M9KVdujbuvFv2fZ2KQwNGW2OzD5Y3d3achGEgZC8J6g at mail.gmail.com>

Would you care to elaborate?  I have always had a hard time swallowing this
critique, regardless of the author.  It seems to imply that female
characters in fiction should act according to some preexisting template,
and that it is a failing on the part of the author to not follow that
template.  Fictional characters "can" act however the author wants or needs
them to, correct?  If Wolfe (or any other author) chooses to have all his
female characters be very similar to one another and display the same
quirks or character flaws, that is just repetitive writing, which is a very
different problem than "not knowing how to write women characters".  Put
another way; perhaps we never hear of women authors who "can't write men"
because it is less ingrained that male characters *ought* to act a certain
way.

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>wrote:

> Sergei SOLOVIEV wrote:
> > What are the "lows" of Wolfe, to your opinion?
>
> Well, one would be his female characters.
>
> --
> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120417/f9d14934/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net